Rick Shea, Ben Harper and more to perform at Claremont Folk Festival

Singer songwriter Rick Shea at Fret House Inc. in Covina on Wednesday, May 14, 2014. Shea will be one of the featured performers for the Claremont Folk Festival May 31. (Photo by Watchara Phomicinda/ San Gabriel Valley Tribune)

Scheduled artists include Ben Harper and his mother Ellen Harper, David Hidalgo and Louie Perez of Los Lobos, Dave Alvin and the Guilty Ones, The Chapin Sisters, Gonzalo Bergara Quartet, Rick Shea and more. There will be workshops on songwriting, protest folk songs, instrument basics, as well as techniques and genre-related specialties for percussion, guitar, banjo, ukulele and harmonica. Also planned are activities like printmaking, planting, a butterfly pavilion, song and drum circles, an art show and food vendors.

The festival started in 1970 with a small group of dulcimer players meeting in Memorial Park, said festival coordinator Robin Young. It served as community outreach for the Folk Music Center, owned by Charles and Dorothy Chase, which has a long history of presenting concerts by both local and national artists.

“The festival serves to remind us, and the rest of the area, that Claremont is a unique treasure trove of talent and support for the arts,” Young said. “Proceeds go to the Dorothy and Charles Chase Folk Music & Culture Education Fund, which exists to advance, promote and preserve folk music, instruments and culture.”

Although folk and roots music has always been a part of the scene, it has seen a resurgence in popularity over the past few years. Young believes it’s because social and political turmoil is reflected in the arts and the problems of the past are the same ones we have today.

“The baby got sick, the bank closed down, a flood took the crops — nowadays the baby is in a huge modern hospital, the bank is an international finance institution and the flood was due to climate change, but the feelings evoked are no different than they ever were by those experiencing them,” Young said.

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Singer/songwriter Rick Shea is among the artists selected to perform at the Claremont Folk Festival and he will also be leading a songwriting workshop.

“Rick’s songwriting skill crafts those stories into palpable feelings and tangible people that don’t leave you alone,” Young said. “Rick was born and raised in San Bernardino and saw the end of the post World War II glory days as they turned into urban blight and foreclosures. He writes about the people he saw and how their experiences affected their lives.”

This is the third or fourth time Shea has performed at the festival. He had been playing concerts at the Folk Music Center for 8 to 10 years when they first asked him to participate in the event.

Shea is a full-time musician, who works part-time at the Fret House in Covina. In 2013, the Covina resident released the album, “Sweet Bernardine” (Tres Pescadores Records). The effort digs deeper into and reveals more of Shea’s personal life than his previous works, he said. It is also highly focused on the history of the Southland.

“I’ve always been interested and I continue to be interested in where I’ve come from and where I’ve spent most of my life in Southern California,” Shea said.

“California, to me, is such an amazing place because it started, as far as the California that we know, with the Gold Rush and people coming here for a dream. It’s one of the quintessential stories of California, people that come here in search of something, in search of a dream or something new or something new about themselves.”

A good example of this is in Shea’s song “Mariachi Hotel,” which tells the story of mariachi musicians coming to California, dealing with a different culture and music, while following their dreams. The musicians forge new identities and new lives, yet still face the same struggles as any artist.

Shea does some research for his songs, focusing on what sparks his interest. One source, a gift from a friend, is the book “Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California’s Inland Empire” (Heyday) by Gayle Wattawa. It contains a collection of fiction and non-fiction works, including Native American poetry and pieces by Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler and M.F.K. Fisher.

After the Claremont Folk Festival, Shea will be playing with Wanda Jackson at the Ink and Iron Festival at the Queen Mary in Long Beach on June 6 and Casbah in San Diego on June 7. He is hoping to tour Europe in October and November. Shea is also working on a recording with Mary McCaslin and has a couple of other side projects as well.

“In between all of that I will be starting the songwriting process and the recording process for myself,” Shea said. “Sometimes it can take a pretty long time, so it’s never too early to start.”